A Sputnik* Moment

Many Americans are unaware of the young minds around the globe who are competing and will complete with American graduates. As Americans and as educators 0 globalization and technology expertise can not be taken lightly!

From 2,070 universities in 88 countries, the top one hundred and three teams of students competed for bragging rights and prizes at The 35th Annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals sponsored by IBM on May 30, 2011, in Orlando Florida, USA, and hosted by IBM.

The contest pits teams of three university students against eight or more complex, real-world problems, with a grueling five-hour deadline. Huddled around a single computer, competitors race against the clock in a battle of logic, strategy and mental endurance.

Teammates collaborate to rank the difficulty of the problems, deduce the requirements, design test beds, and build software systems that solve the problems under the intense scrutiny of expert judges. For a well-versed computer science student, some of the problems require precision only. Others require a knowledge and understanding of advanced algorithms. Still others are simply too hard to solve – except, of course, for the world’s brightest problem-solvers.

Judging is relentlessly strict. The students are given a problem statement – not a requirements document. They are given an example of test data, but they do not have access to the judges’ test data and acceptance criteria. Each incorrect solution submitted is assessed a time penalty. The team that solves the most problems in the fewest attempts in the least cumulative time is declared the winner.

To learn more about the ICPC, please visit http://acmicpc.org or http://icpc.baylor.edu/ . Visit the ICPC podcast series at http://battleofthebrains.podbean.com for insights from past contestants and current IBM executives.

* Sputnik was the first artificial satellite to be put in earth’s orbit. On October 4, 1957 the Russian’s successfully place Sputnik in orbit. I was 9 and I still remember it. Sputnik woke up America!!!